All Our Yesterdays

Last Friday Dr George Adamson of Kings College London very kindly conducted an hour long interview about, well, El Niños and the history of how they’ve been conceptualised, what we might expect and what to watch out for. I think it’s an excellent use of your time. It’s been lightly edited, but meaning preserved.

Marc Hudson

Is this El Niño different, and if so, how?

George Adamson  

It is different in the sense that it’s stronger. The warming is more intense. So the way that global scientists tend to define El Niño now is the way it’s defined in America; and there’s a whole other history there about why the American definition gets taken up by everyone else, which I won’t go into. But that defines El Niño through temperature rises in a region called Niño- 3.4, and there’s a history of that region which I won’t go into. 

Marc Hudson

I read that it was an accident in a radio interview in one of your chapters, kind of something like that. 

George Adamson  

Yeah, yeah. A guy wrote it down literally on the back of a napkin. But it’s a rectangular block of water in the equatorial Pacific, towards the eastern side of the Pacific, but not actually hitting the coast, which gets the maximum level of warming during El Niño events – or most El Niño events. 

It’s also an area where temperature there has most impact on the weather patterns in the USA, which is why NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration took it up, which then got taken up by the World Meteorological Organisation. 

That is hitting very, very warm temperatures. In fact, we’ve hit record temperatures already. 

Marc Hudson

Two months early. 

George Adamson

Yeah, normally in September it doesn’t usually peak – certainly, the ones that we’ve got measured – haven’t peaked until much much later than that. So it is different. You have to bear in mind that the background is changing as well. So the ocean as a whole is getting warmer. 

So a direct comparison doesn’t quite work. In fact, NOAA has started to use a slightly different measure, rather than just looking at what’s called the ONI, Oceanic Niño Index, which is how much warmer is it than the average. It’s a measure that takes account of the fact that the average is moving. That doesn’t give quite so high extremes, but it is still unusually warm. And of those that we have good measurements for, which is early 80s-ish onwards, depends on how you measure it, maybe early 70s onwards. This one looks like it will be by far the strongest. 

So it is stronger, and there are various things that you expect to come with that. You expect to have heavy rainfall in Peru. One thing that is different in this El Niño, well, maybe different from 2015-16, is the 2015 -6 El Niño was not associated with heavy rainfall in the classic El Niño region of Peru.

I was going to say it’s unusual in that sense. Actually, every El Niño is unusual. Back in the 90s, particularly with the 97-98 El Niño, scientists thought they had the answer, and they basically understood how El Niños worked. 

And almost every single one since then has been surprising. This one is surprising in its intensity. But we should probably expect to have heavy rainfall in Peru. We should expect collapse in some fish stocks off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, with impacts on food. We should expect disruption to growth of crops pretty much all the way along the western coast of the Americas, north and south, and other parts of the Americas as well, Brazil, for example.

And we expect and are already seeing a particularly intense haze event, or they call them “haze seasons” now. But these are totally  manufactured anthropogenic seasons in Southeast Asia, which is where the forests are burnt every year. And this is happening so often that it creates so much smoke that has created a haze season in Southeast Asia. That is becoming strong, and you expect it to be strong because the rainfall in Southeast Asia will be lower than normal, which means the fires will burn bigger and longer. And the reason I’m kind of stuttering a bit when I’m saying that is because there never used to be a “haze season”, and El Niño does not cause it. El Niño makes it worse, but the fires are set by people. You know, they didn’t used to burn that much forest in Southeast Asia, but they do, and without the rain, that’s going to be an even bigger problem. 

Marc Hudson The next question is “what should cautious readers/viewers be alerted to in terms of hype, misinformation, disinformation?” 

So the hype, I think -and I’m slightly jumping forward here to some of your future questions. – the hype for me comes in the relationship between El Niño and climate change. 

Now, El Niño, or what we now call El Niño. The term has changed a lot over the 150 years or so that it’s been common parlance. But what we now call El Nino is, as far as we can tell, a natural phenomenon. And it occurs basically because the Pacific is really really wide, so the winds can blow unabated, and that changes the the height of the surface water, and it changes some of the atmospheric patterns because of that, just because of the Earth is turning. But ultimately, if you are pushing water from one side of an ocean to another, you get a gravitational difference: one side of the ocean is basically higher than the other, and there will be certain periods where gravity does its thing, and that water kind of sloshes back, and and that changes the ocean temperatures and the atmospheric patterns. 

Ultimately, it will be unstable because the Earth is turning in the other direction, so it will spring back again. And that will happen. It happens a little bit in the Atlantic, which is much much narrower. It happens a little bit in the Indian Ocean. It happens a lot in the Pacific Ocean. And as long as we have continents. If you think  250 million years ago, when we had Pangaea, it was one supercontinent, and then a massive ocean, there would have been enormous El Niños, and so that will always happen. 

There is also climate change, and climate change is an anthropogenic phenomenon caused by ; we all know what climate change is. 

I would say be aware of two things. The minor thing to be aware of is hype about the relationship between climate change and the strength of this El Niño. There’s a real tendency, I think, because we can see, you know, with our own eyes, climate change “out there” now. It’s not just an idea; like it is changing the world around us. 

It’s tempting to think, “well, that must be why the El Niño is so strong”, and I can’t say definitely that that’s not the case. You know, maybe at some point people will be able to draw that link. What I can say,  when I was writing the book and doing some work in that area around 2020-2021ish, I had a look at the various climate model runs on what was going to change with El Niño going forward

And almost everything was predicted: less El Niños, more El Niños, more variability, less variability, stronger La Niñas, you know, etc. etc. So be wary of people drawing that link too much. 

What you can say is that “climate change warms the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and more energy, so some of the impacts of an El Niño will be stronger,” in the sense of an impact of anything. You know, hurricanes can be stronger, and in the Pacific, hurricanes anyway tend to be stronger during El Niño events. So, the maximum intensity of hurricanes is likely to be stronger. Global temperature will rise next year, almost definitely. 

So this is where you need to be wary the other way. Global temperature will rise next year, and what you’ll see is “El Niño was pushing global temperature to levels never seen before”, and that’s kind of half true, but also very very misleading. 

Because you have basically the pool of warm water which usually sits on the western Pacific; during an El Niño event, that becomes much larger across the Pacific, which means a lot of that water from the ocean can get released into the atmosphere. And that has always been the case. 

So, if you looked at a pre-climate change graph of global temperature – as much as it’s possible to do that – what you’d see is peaks and troughs, and a lot of those peaks would be associated with El Niño years, but they would then be associated with troughs, where that warmth was then locked back into the ocean. So, what will happen in 2027, and it is already happening now, is that energy that is in the ocean will be released into the atmosphere, and the following year, some of that energy will go back into the ocean.

So, were climate change not happening, it would just be a curio for scientists: “oh, it’s interesting. You get a warm year and then you get a cold year,  isn’t that interesting?” But for the vast majority of people, it would be totally uninteresting. 

What’s happening here is a lot of that energy will be released into the atmosphere, and when it drops again, and it all averages out in five or six years’ time, the trend will have been upwards because climate change makes it warmer. So, really watch out for that. What will happen next year is the temperature will get warmer because the temperature always gets warmer, and El Niño is just part of the noise within the upwards trend. So that’s one thing to to watch out for.

And then the other one is this the more directly, I don’t want to use the word sceptical, but you know obfuscation that will come with El Niño, where people say, “Oh, it’s hot. Oh, well, it’s just El Niño, we don’t need to talk about it.” Again, that’s partly true, but totally misleading.

Marc Hudson  

Yeah, as I said, it’s already there in the Daily Mail. They’ve got various techniques that they use all the time, and then El Niño, when possible, they use. Its own form of pulse and press disturbances with a pun on ‘press’ I guess I’ll have to work that in somehow. 

Various researchers have pointed to how El Niño La Niña is gendered, and I came across this via the footnotes in the chapter “climate change and society” in your book, and I went and read the Julia Miller piece, which I thought had some useful points. How does this gendering shape our perceptions, and what does labelling this one a “Godzilla” do? I mean, how do these framings make it easier and harder to think in certain ways, to get constructivist?

George Adamson  

Yeah. Okay.. So La Niña was a term that was invented in the 1980s. 

So El Niño, as I said, is a term that has changed over the years. It was originally used by Peruvian fishermen to refer to an annual water current, which you get every single year off of South America. And as more and more attention was focused on it, it shifted in meaning towards this multi-year, variable Pacific-wide global phenomenon that we talk about now. 

So whilst the meaning of El Niño has changed, it has changed organically. La Niña was very specifically introduced. It was introduced in the 1980s. And it was introduced because you know when there’s warm years, those warm years are followed by cold years. When there’s years where it’s particularly wet over Peru and particularly dry over Indonesia, there’s also a reverse. You know the kind of extremes of the norm. If you want to be cynical about this, then you can just say that if you normalise anything,, so you have the y-axis going through the zero, you’re necessarily going to have a negative and a positive. 

And people were throwing around words for these ‘negative’ El Niño events. One I really liked was El Viejo, so the old man for El Niño is young man. I almost wonder just the whole connotations of what we now call La Niña is, and even what El Niño is, would have been very different if it was the old man and the young man. But that didn’t stick. 

There was a time in the 70s where the term anti-niño or anti-El Niño was going around, but you couldn’t use that because El Niño comes from baby Jesus. It’s the “boy”, the “Christ child”. So anti niño becomes the antichrist. Okay, so we can’t have the “antichrist”! 

So George Philander is a South African scientist who was working in America. He came up with this idea of let’s call it La Niña. What it does, calling it La Niña, is kind of two things. 

One is, we have assumptions in Western society about what is masculine and what is feminine, and masculine is stronger, it’s hotter, it’s drier. Feminine is you know more wet, cooler, and less intense. So La Niña gets associated with nice spring rains, whereas El Niño is fierce summer droughts. Actually, La Niña, or what we now refer to as La Niña, can be associated with devastating floods in lots of parts of the world and in droughts in some places. La Niña is not “less bad” than El Niño. The global hydro-meteorological hazards that you get during a La Niña event are just as fierce as they are during an El Niñoevent. They’re not quite the opposite, but they happen in different places, so that’s the first thing. The second thing is, I think that El Niño. What we’ve done is, we’ve given a complicated pattern of ocean atmosphere variability, which takes place in the Pacific and affects the whole world, a name. We’ve called it a thing, which means as soon as you do that, you put boundaries on it. 

So, I mean, use an analogy of naming storms. Naming storms kind of makes sense because a storm literally is bounded. I mean, you know, because of the way the high pressure sits in a storm, the edge of a storm is very, very defined, and and and the edge of a hurricane will be. You can have clear weather. You know, you can see a hurricane coming across the ocean. El Niño is not like that. It’s not bounded. It’s not bounded in space. It’s not bounded in time, and it’s certainly not bounded in the effects that the variability that you see around the world that is associated with an El Niño event is certainly not bounded, and it is always changing. But calling it El Niño gives an illusion that this is the case, and when you call the other side of El Niño La Niña, I think that even really strengthens that because you know we all naturally, you know we understand boy girl, we understand binaries. We live in a world where you know 95% of the population are one gender or another.

So you know we live in a world of binaries. We kind of understand that, and I think it then strengthens the mental shortcut that people make about El Niño being a bounded thing. 

So we can forecast El Niños quite well a long time in advance, which is a really wonderful thing. Just the scientists found in the late 80s, early 90s that variability in the Central Pacific was quite predictable. You know, a long time before we had really good general circulation models, people discovered they could forecast El Niño using really quite simple models of basically just what’s happening in the equator. Now we have a whole bunch of models, so disaster managers in various different places should be able to use those models to prepare for what’s happening in their country. 

But I think that when you then frame that as “an El Niño is coming”, you lose some of the benefits there because that leads to an assumption that things will be the same as they were during the last El Niño. I mean, that was a big problem in Peru in 2015-16, as everyone assumed it would be like it was in 97, 98, and it wasn’t. And in fact, actually, Peru got El Nino type flooding in 2017 when no one was expecting it. 

And the problems with the definitions and the forecast was not clearly the only problem with what was happening in Peru at that time, but it didn’t help. So bounding it and then giving it a life and gives it lots of agency, and then it becomes much easier to say things like, “Oh, you know, it’s 21 degrees on the 25th of September where I am at the moment. Well, that’s happening because of El Niño.” I mean, the relationship between what’s happening in the Pacific and what’s happening in summer autumn temperatures in the UK is very weak. It’s not, not there, but it’s very, very weak. It’s very, very difficult to work out, in the moment, what is causing our weather to be what it is. And even this idea of what’s causing it to be what it is, you know, weather fluctuates. 

You know, I’m, I’m going to kind of contradict what I said earlier about climate change when I said “it’s complicated.” In another way, climate change is very simple. You know, my simple answer to the question “why is it so warm in late September?” is “it’s climate change.” You know, there are all kinds of things that are happening that make our weather fluctuate. You know, the fact that we have high pressure and it’s warm is caused by all kinds of reasons. The fact we have high pressure and it’s this warm is caused by the fact there’s a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that wasn’t there before. So El Niño, the more you personalise something, the easier it is to blame, and “Godzilla” does that as well. You know this idea of the Godzilla. It interests me that that idea of Godzilla is circulating so much this year because that was thrown out in 2014 or 2015 because that 2015 El Niño took a year longer to develop than people thought. So somewhere during that period and it was Bill Patzert, a climate scientist at NASA who came out with it, and the general feeling amongst the community was, “this is ridiculous”. I mean, I interviewed a whole bunch of American El Niño scientists in late 2016, and they went, “you know, there’s this term Godzilla knocking around, and none of us pay any attention to it,” and then suddenly this year [2026], it’s common parlance. You know, I have people in India coming to me and saying, “Oh, George, you know, you work in El Niño. Like we’re all talking about how it’s going to be a Godzilla El Niño.” Yeah. So that’s just as an academic interest, I find that fascinating. 

Marc Hudson  

Can I interject a second on the Godzilla thing? Well, I mean, obviously we both know that it was the Godzilla monster comes from the Japanese, post-Hiroshima, feeling that there will be revenge, that there will be a reckoning. And it also occurs to me that there is a subset of climate activists so exhausted by their inability to get policy change that  they’re wishing for and wanting some sort of enormous “slap”. You know that  Batman meme where he slaps Robin,

 where people are hoping that an outside agent – a Godzilla – will just come and cut through all the flimflam and make it easier to talk about – and take – action to fix our broader problem. So El Niño itself and Godzilla El Niño especially, become a hoped for saviour almost.

George Adamson  

That’s so interesting because that was happening in 2015 as well. So 2015 was a really strong drought year in California, and it was being described as the reason that it was in drought was because there was a an unusual mass of warm water sitting somewhere off the coast of California, which was deflecting away the the rains that would usually hit them, and that mass got called the Blob.[Wikipedia]  

And what happened in 2015 was that people were hoping that El Niño would come and fight the Blob. I think that is actually one of the Godzilla monsters, as he fights something called the Blob. So there’s cartoons out there, Godzilla versus the Blob, which I use in  some of my lectures. So yeah, I hadn’t really thought about it that way. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing. That actually people want it. People want Godzilla to come out and start smashing buildings, so that people go, “Oh yeah, there’s a there’s a problem here.” Yeah, I mean, my sense is that won’t work.

Marc Hudson  

Mine too.

George Adamson  

Yeah, I don’t know. That’s something to keep an eye on. I think if you’re watching the media coverage, watch Godzilla, and see what Godzilla does as an idea.

Marc Hudson  

At the moment, my Google alerts is “El Niño” and “Impacts”, but I think I might add El Niño and Godzilla, and see what happens. Right, we’re almost done. Based on previous El Niños, how might we see politicians using El Niño to frame or reframe their climate and energy policies? What blame shifting will happen, and how might the denialists or lukewarmers use El Niñoto push their perspectives?

George Adamson  

I’d say based on El Niño on previous El Niños, it will do nothing to climate and energy policy. 

Marc Hudson  

But what about politicians’ efforts to reframe? I mean, you think that they won’t use it, or

George Adamson  

So it will. They will use it in disaster management. So this is the discourse with this El Niño is new because climate change is so strongly woven into it. It was a bit in 2015-16 in the two previous big ones, the 1982 and the 1997 El Niños, climate change wasn’t really being talked about. Politicians were using it to deflect against poor disaster management. Like, “oh, it flooded here.” “Well, you know, the flood defences have fallen apart over the last 20 years,” “oh yeah, but it’s El Niño.” It’s not. I think it probably will depend on the politician. You know, in this country, I don’t imagine that our Prime Minister will say anything about El Niño at all. I can imagine that you know the esteemed president of the USA might might mention it once or twice.

Marc Hudson  

And get his sharpie out and do some weather modification?

George Adamson  

Yeah and probably do some climate modelling with his pen, but that will just become part of the insane ramblings that come out of his mouth. I think The lukewarmists, yeah, it will just become, as you said, part of their arsenal. As we don’t need to, we don’t need to worry about this because… you know, there’s always something we don’t need to worry about this because. and El Niño is, it’s there. 

My parents live in France in the summer, and it was really hot in France this summer. Like you know, it was really hot in the UK, it was even hotter. And they said they would speak to people, and not necessarily Le Pen voters, just you know, ordinary people who would say, “oh yeah, but it’s this El Nino that’s causing this”, so yeah, it’s there. It’s floating around in the discourse.

Marc Hudson  

I want  to say El Niño allows you to do is to not talk about or think about climate change because climate change is so painful. Because, you and I and anyone older than us has been warned about this for three, four decades now. And to admit that we’re now living with the consequences of having ignored previous warnings is quite painful. And so, El Niño will be a useful, almost willed distraction, where everyone can worry about it so that they don’t have to think about the underlying press disturbance. And with El Niño is just the pulse disturbance. But it’ll be useful to individuals in that way. Okay, that’s worth thinking about.

George Adamson  

I absolutely agree with you, and I think it’s always worth keeping in mind that we can focus on deniers, you know, and there clearly are people out there who just like to disagree with what things that people like me and you talk about just because they don’t like us for whatever reason. But everybody does it to an extent, you know, and because, as you said, it’s like climate change is hard. It’s so hard.  I’ve been working- I started my PhD in 2009. I started my undergraduate degree in 2001 – So, to a greater or lesser extent, I’ve been working in this area for 25 years. And it’s not just the fact we haven’t dealt with it that makes it clear how hard it is. It’s just the more that I look into it, the more I realise how hard it is to deal with. So yeah, I mean I can see the temptation of saying, “Oh, but there’s a there’s a natural event which is going to come and cause…” you know it’s almost like a relief for a little bit.

Marc Hudson  

And also that word “natural. Even when people concede that you know cobra venom is natural and that hurricanes are natural, natural still comes with this assumption of benevolence or beneficence, or at least inevitability. “Well, you can’t do anything; it’s just natural.” Yeah,

George Adamson  

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that entirely.

Marc Hudson  

Besides your own work on El Niño, which I would recommend to other people, having read bits of it, and thank you for the 2023 article you sent – I  haven’t read beyond the abstract yet – Who else should people be reading on El Niño, either the science or the sociology or whatever. Who would you give a shout out to?

George Adamson  

There was a book published in the early 2000s , Chagnon et al, that’s all about the media coverage of the El Nino in 1997. 

There is a really good paper if you’re interested in the power of discourse by someone called Marika Sturken. She’s a cultural theorist, I suppose you’d say, called “Desiring the Weather: El Niño, the media, and California identity”, which was published in 2001, and it was all about how the Weather Channel and the way that it presented El Niño and how that spoke to California’s view of itself, and particularly Californian men in the late ’90s post Cold War era, that one is absolutely fascinating. 

Let me think of more recent stuff. Well, anything by Mickey Glantz is worth reading. …. he was working on El Niño before it was El Niño. Yes, his original work was on Peruvian fishery. Yes, back in the 70s, so he was there when El Niño started to materialise, and he’s a great person to talk to. He’s a great person to read his work because he’s always worked in El Niño, but he’s also been a slight outsider. He’s an engineer by training who’s become a social scientist or sociologist of science. He has worked with all of the big El Niño scientists without being one, so he’s always had a bit of a been a bit of a commentator on what’s happening, so reading any of his stuff and actually just following the stuff he said about El Niño from the 70s through to today, that’s an interesting story on its own. 

Lastly, I’d say Philander’s book, George Phillander’s book, the guy who came up with La Niña, which is called “Our affair with El Niño, how we transformed an enchanting Peruvian climate hazard into a  into a global climate hazard”.  

marc hudson  

Final question is always “anything else you’d like to say?”

George Adamson  

Just to reiterate, no one should ignore what’s happening in the Pacific. You know, there is a phenomenon that takes place in the Pacific which is related to the movement of warm water, and that affects global weather patterns. And this year, it looks like it’s going to be very strong. It will be the strongest we’ve ever recorded. Whether it’s the strongest ever, I don’t know. I mean, when you see people say, “Oh, the tree ring records suggest there’s been nothing that strong” I mean, there’s so much uncertainty in the tree ring record. I would take that with a bit of a pinch of salt. It is significant. People should be taking the forecast of El Niño seriously, particularly if you’re responsible for agriculture or disaster management on either side of the Pacific, or in fact almost anywhere in the tropics. You know, you should really be taking this seriously. However, as a consumer of the media, particularly in the UK, read everything you read about El Niño with a critical lens.

Marc Hudson  

I think that’s a great note to end on…